Writing Resources

Beyond Dickinson

Students Describe Their Current 404 Projects

Elizabeth Rawitsch, '03, Saratoga Springs, New York:
(Untitled)
Reflecting on his recovery from a devastating and undiagnosed illness in
his autobiography, director Frank Capra declared, "Beginning with Mr.
Deeds Goes to Town, my films had to say something." Auteur critics,
however, often intentionally overlook Lost Horizon (1937), the film that
immediately followed Deeds At first glance their reaction is understandable;
Horizon does not follow the same pattern as the majority of Capra's work.
It takes place in Tibet, not the United States, and British characters outnumber
the Americans. Furthermore, film critics argue that the protagonist is not
pitted against anything; the utopian plot of the film lacks conflict. Although
it was a critical and commercial success upon its release, in retrospect
Horizon is a puzzling film. Using a historically-based auteurist approach,
I will attempt to prove that auteur theorists who ignore Horizon have missed
the point. The historical period during which this film was set "the
Great Depression" serves as the conflict within the film. Although Horizon
is a utopian fantasy, utopias attempt to correct the problems currently existing
within their societies "in this case, America" and therefore it
is still overtly political; Capra still "says something." However,
I will also attempt to prove that, as in many of his films, what Capra "says" is
slightly muddled. His utopia is not a perfect society, despite his argument
that its celebration of moderation is the true form of perfection. The theme
of visible cracks in a seemingly perfect society is consistent with Capra's
oeuvre, and therefore emphasizes Horizon's thematic importance in his work
as a whole.

Maggie Andrews, '03, Danville, PA:
Roald Dahl and the Fractured Family
Children’s literature is often overlooked as an obvious comment on
the role and structure of the nuclear family. The archetype of an evil family
that the child must escape stretches back as far Cinderella’s evil
step-sisters, to as contemporary as Harry Potter’s detestable Dursley’s.
The families in the majority of Roald Dahl’s children’s novels
are no exception. The parents are immature, cruel, and often non-existent.
This fractured portrayal of family structure forces the hero/heroine to become
an independent person, assuming the responsibilities of the adult world.
Only a courageous and imaginative child can survive through the family situations
of Dahl’s novels. So why is this convention so successful with children?
Is it possible that these tales appeal to young children because they also
long to escape from their family? I plan to focus on how Dahl resolves these
familial conflicts with his dark humor and fanciful escapes. It is an undeniable
fact that children’s literature does make an impression upon young
readers, and I plan to examine how much of an impact Dahl’s novels
have upon their readers. A close reading of these novels James and the Giant
Peach, Matilda, and Dahl’s autobiography Boy, generates a completely
new set of ethical questions dealing with the responsibilities of parents
and the power that one child may possess. Are Dahl’s solutions of magical
powers or fanciful journeys an acceptable resolution to their familial problems?
Or do they inspire and encourage a subtle anger and disrespect toward parental
figures?

Jason Hilton, '03 ,Seattle, WA:
Common Heroes: Passivity In Opposition to PerceptionF.
Scott Fitzgerald’s goal in 1922 to write, something new--something extraordinary
and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned" created his seminal
work The Great Gatsby. In it, the almost mythical heroism of Jay Gatsby is
built up and then defeated. The passive heroes of John Updike and John Cheever
work toward the same type of destruction of the American image of the hero
in their works, The Centaur and “The Swimmer, respectively. While the
idea of a common hero is itself not a new creation, these heroes stand out
within the context of American literary ideas of heroism. It is important that
these characters are all passive heroes because these authors write about,
and in, the upper-middle class of America. From this class, a perception of
what an American hero is supposed to be is generated. These three authors use
their heroes to move what is “supposed” to be considered a hero
away from the euphoria of WWI, WWII and idealism of the 1950’s. This
new hero stands in opposition to the ideas of heroism and success based on
financial and social stature in upper class society.

I will establish the characters as passive heroes and then place them in
context of the American canon as well as in the context of a cultural perspective.
I plan on using reader response criticism to examine the effect of such heroes
on the American reader.

Gabrielle Snyder, '03, Northumberland, PA:
Exploring Aestheticism and Identity in Modernist Europe through Ballet and
Text
Around 1929, choreographer George Balanchine and author Christopher Isherwood
articulated the post-war cultural climates of London and Berlin by producing
pieces of literary and performance art that serve to unmask, and therefore
reshape, the tumultuous period of modernist Europe through their protagonists'
progression towards consciousness. I will argue that Balanchine's expressionist
ballet The Prodigal Son and Isherwood's The Berlin Stories paradoxically
show the superficiality and consequent devastation of hedonism by developing
the protagonists' consciousness of national and individual identity through
the exploitation of 'life as a spectacle' using aestheticism, iconography,
and significant form. Specifically in 1929-1933, the attractiveness of debauchery
and capitalism in these avant-garde capitals of Europe became a partition
between fantasy and truth, protecting those who chose to live in a state
of oblivion from confronting the dangers of reality, which were not limited
to oncoming warfare and the insidious destruction of moral character.

I will explore the cultures and theatrical scenes of London and Weimar Berlin
to identify the pluralism of modernist definition found in ballet, as ephemera,
versus the tangible substantiality of literature. In this way, literature
and performance can be treated as forms of communication capable of intertextual
analysis. By defining the crises and the radical aesthetic ideal each work
presents, the protagonists' change in level of consciousness can be traced
and related to the larger cultural contexts that occur simultaneously. Using
new historical criticism, as well as addressing the underlying themes of
homosexuality and feminism, I hope to show how consciousness, representation
of sexuality, the masking of reality and classification of characters, and
the eventual deconstruction of these assumptions characterize individual
identity as something that is indeterminate and changeable, causing an increased
sense of displacement from a fixed people and culture.

On a national scale, the ambiguity of identity regarding war, race, and
gender had filtered down to the individual, where performance and reality,
the mask and the self, became integrated into several indistinguishable and
obscured archetypes of what a human being 'is' and 'should be.' Particularly
following the gruesomeness of world war and economic decline, the appeal
of aesthetics to human sensorial perception obscures both truth and falsehood
to the point that the desire for fantasy essentially usurps reality. The
act of living one's life, either consciously or unconsciously, becomes performance.

Primary sources include Isherwood's The Berlin Stories, a VHS recording
of a 1978 performance of The Prodigal Son (possibly more recent performances
as well), and the original libretto by Boris Kochno. Works by authors Hollahan,
McKibbon, and Hynes will provide information on the construction of class
and crisis consciousness during this era. Supplementary texts for cultural
study will include: Berlin Cabaret, The Weimar Republic, Divine Decadence,
and Reconfiguring Modernism, as well as other essays that focus on the evolution
of ballet to modernist art in London and cabaret shows in Berlin. Julia Kristeva,
Susan Friedman, and Ralph Freedman's studies in intertextuality, definitions
of modernism, and consciousness will provide the background in critical theory.

Gabrielle Snyder (left) and Sarah Fair (right)

Sarah Fair, '03, Butler, PA:
Insanity in the Victorian Woman
My senior seminar paper will concentrate on the treatment of the insane woman
during the Victorian Era in Britain. I will be writing on Charlotte Bronte's
novel, Jane Eyre, as the focus of my study. In this novel, Bronte uses the
character, Bertha Rochester, better known to many as the "madwoman in
the attic," to display a female lunatic in Nineteenth Century Britain.
I will be looking at the character of Bertha as an example of Victorian society's
view of the insane, and studying the treatment that she, as a character,
was subjected to, and then comparing it to the treatment of Victorian women
in insane asylums during the same period.

Through my research, I plan to prove that the inhumane treatment of mentally
ill Victorian women had a great effect on Victorian society. I anticipate
to show that Charlotte Bronte's purpose in creating the character of Bertha
Rochester was to demonstrate the corruption in Victorian society, especially,
but not limited to, the treatment of women. I will illustrate the high ideals
that society expected Victorian women to follow, and will hopefully connect
these expectations with insanity in these women. I will also explain the
treatments that mentally ill women underwent in insane asylums in order to
demonstrate Victorian society's contempt for these diseases.

Abbe Watson, '03, Pleasantville, PA:The
fourteenth century Italian poet Petrarch established the mode of the ideal
poetic muse in the Renaissance. Many critics argue that the subject of
Petrarchan love poetry, the unattainable Laura, is the means by which Petrarch
establishes his own subjectivity. Petrarchan poetics became popular in
England in the sixteenth century, with many poets who followed suite, or
sought to revise Petrarch’s stance on love. My interest is in the
ways that the early seventeenth century female poets, Lady Mary Wroth,
a popular aristocratic woman and niece of poet, Sir Philip Sidney, and
Aemilia Lanyer, a middle class woman from London, reacted to Petrarchan
conventions in their poetry. I shall compare Wroth’s long sonnet
sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, as well as her narrative story, The
Countesse of Montgomerie’s Urania with Lanyer’s collection
of poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, which includes a feminist revision
of familiar Biblical stories, as well as her inaugural “country house” poem, “A
Description of Cookham.”
A central question to my argument shall be how the female gaze, or the way
in which these poets depict the love “object” in their sonnets
is inherently different from the approach of Petrarch, as well as contemporary
male poets. Is Wroth’s poetry significantly different because she writes
in the voice of a woman addressing an absent male lover? What does it mean
for Lanyer to gaze upon other women? I shall employ the feminist criticism
of Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick and Luce Irigaray to expound upon the notion of
the female “gaze.”

Using art and architectural theory, I shall also explore the spaces of love
in Wroth and Lanyer’s poetry. I am interested in the ways that these
poets use the traditional pastoral retreat (the spaces of the country house,
landscape and nature) as the essential space of their love. Ultimately, I
shall discern the ways that Wroth and Lanyer revise traditional patriarchal
tropes of place and love in order to establish a female voice and subjectivity.

Sara Hoover, '03, Blacksburg, VA:
Inventing a New Plot
At the end of Virginia Woolf's novel Between the Acts Isabel Oliver concludes "Surely
it was time someone invented a new plot" (194). Throughout her writings,
Woolf suggests one of the fundamental problems with narrative in fiction
as well as on a larger cultural level was that it was tied to patriarch social
structure. For women, written narratives were problematic because they were
bound to endings centered on marriage or death. In my thesis, I plan to explore
how by attempting to reform women's access to education in British society,
Woolf engages the possibility of constructing "a new plot." In
her own experience as a reader, Woolf recognized that due to educational
deficiencies, women were historically poor readers, thus lacking the ability
to become observant writers, and ultimately denied an articulate critical
voice necessary to change this system. In response to cultural imperfections,
Woolf throughout her writings attempts to restructure reading, writing, and
critical abilities in order to engage the possibility of plots structured
around professions and the things people do in life. I plan to break my thesis
into three parts, the first of which will look at Woolf and the idea of "the
common reader" in relation to education in the private sphere, the second
of which will look at Woolf as a professional writer in context of the problems
in institutional education, and the third of which will look at how Woolf
uses a critical voice to change the first two processes and how this effects
our own readings of Woolf in texts such as Michael Cunningham's The Hours.
My primary texts will include biographies of Woolf, non-fictional works such
as Common Reader, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, and fictional works
such as Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts which I will
use in an effort to explore Woolf's response to women's education as seen
as a reader and as constructed as a writer. Ultimately I hope to suggest
that by looking at the relationship between gender, education, and narrative,
Woolf attempts to transcend gender as a framework for learning and thus for
social narratives. By helping to create a new fictional space, Woolf is able
to create space for a new cultural plot.